Automon

Pokemon parodies are common enough that most don't need a second look, but Automon earns one by actually building a functional auto-battler underneath its jokes rather than coasting on the premise alone. Capture creatures, assign them elemental types and abilities, and let battles largely resolve automatically while you make the strategic calls that matter between fights. Reviewers repeatedly describe the result as genuinely addictive in short bursts — "Slay the Spire meets Pokemon, but without taking itself seriously" is about as concise a summary as this review's research turned up, and it's an accurate one.

Genuine humor, genuine short-session pull

The satire lands specifically because the mechanics underneath it are sound rather than an afterthought. Elemental typing creates real rock-paper-scissors tension, boss encounters every fifth level force players to prepare for randomized elemental threats, and the artwork — deliberately crude in a way that reads as confident rather than lazy — backs up the tone throughout. Reviewers describe genuinely addictive short-session play, several specifically noting they found themselves opening the game daily "just for a little bit" without intending a longer session, which is about as clean a description of a well-tuned roguelite loop as a review can ask for.

A loop with nothing pulling you back to it

Where that loop runs into real trouble is structural rather than mechanical. A specific, repeated complaint concerns the almost complete absence of persistent progression between runs: dying ends a run with nothing meaningfully carried forward beyond which starting character a player picks and whatever area knowledge they've accumulated personally. One reviewer's plea captures the gap directly: "There's nothing to unlock, nothing to upgrade. If I die, I just die, but I don't want to try again." That's a significant structural absence for a genre whose appeal typically rests substantially on exactly that kind of accumulating, run-to-run reward.

Compounding this, several reviewers describe area encounter pools as more fixed than randomized in practice, meaning a replay of the same area after a failed run can feel like repeating an identical sequence rather than encountering the fresh variation roguelites are built around. Build diversity draws a similar complaint: multiple reviewers independently describe one specific support creature (an owl that boosts experience gain) as close to mandatory for effective play, while several elemental-type combinations are reported as simply weak or non-functional, narrowing what should be a wide combinatorial design space down to a smaller set of reliably viable strategies.

A genuinely brutal difficulty curve, confirmed by the numbers

Global achievement data offers a stark, objective picture of just how steep Automon's difficulty actually is: the achievement for beating the game outright sits at under 1% of the playerbase, with several intermediate milestones (ten consecutive wins, a full badge set) sitting only marginally higher. This tracks precisely with reviewer accounts — including from reviewers who recommend the game highly — of never having beaten the final champion despite real, sustained effort and advice from both the community and the developer directly. That's either a serious mark against the game's balance or a genuine badge of honor depending on temperament, but it's worth knowing going in that the vast majority of buyers, including engaged, skilled ones, simply don't finish it.

Real early support, then a shift to something new

The game's origins are worth a brief note too: Automon first released on itch.io before coming to Steam, a common path for small solo passion projects to build an initial audience before a wider storefront launch, and one reviewer specifically expresses relief that the game made that jump rather than staying platform-limited.

Automon received real, sustained patch attention through its first thirteen months, including a dedicated "Automonniversary" content update in early 2023 and continued balance work into April that year. Public development activity for this specific game then goes quiet until October 2024, when the developer announced work on an apparent successor project, "Automon Arena," with progress updates continuing into mid-2025. That timeline suggests the specific structural gaps reviewers raise here — thin meta-progression, narrow build diversity, fixed encounter pools — were judged by the developer to need a larger rework than incremental patches to this release could deliver, rather than issues likely to be addressed within Automon itself going forward.

A dissenting view: is it even an autobattler?

Worth including for balance: at least one detailed critical review pushes back on the genre label itself, arguing Automon lacks the drafting or combining mechanics that define the autobattler genre properly, and that its "autoplay" button — which resolves fights automatically — doesn't by itself qualify the game for the label. That reviewer also found the art unconvincing even accounting for its deliberately ironic presentation, and described the underlying combat as making "the boring combat of Pokemon even more boring." This is a minority view relative to the broadly positive sample, but it's a specific, considered dissent rather than a driveby pan, and worth weighing alongside the more enthusiastic majority rather than dismissing outright — reasonable, engaged players clearly land on both sides of whether the mechanical foundation here is as sound as its biggest fans describe.

Where it lands

Automon succeeds at being funny and mechanically sound in the short term, delivering real addictive pull across individual sessions at a very fair price. Its lack of meaningful run-to-run progression, narrow viable build space, and an achievement-confirmed near-impossible completion rate are real, specific structural shortcomings that keep it from matching the deeper roguelites it invites comparison to. Worth a cheap, funny few hours on its own terms — just don't expect it to hold your attention the way a genre standard-bearer would.